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What ensues is a complex sequence of internal probings.
A drawbridge of affinity begins to lower. And then it happens: you throw your head back slightly. You tip your chin forward. You hold the look in the eyes... and you move on. This happens to me anywhere from two times a day to once every six months. It is an instinctual gesture, rooted deep in ancestry, only understood by black males. I call it The Nod. |
What is The Nod?
The Nod is an evaluation and acknowledgement of an almost
I was born and raised in Birmingham, England, a child of Jamaican immigrants. My biological parents acted like distant relatives. I didn't live with them. I was adopted instead by a white family, who became my primary caretakers. |
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During the week, I lived with them in the white working
class enclave of Erdington. On Sundays I visited my parents
in Whitton,
twenty miles away, where they lived and ran a restaurant.
In the white world where I lived, I walked around in fear for my safety. My white schoolmates and neighbors were given to degrading, vitriolic epithets about my ancestors. When I voiced my feelings about this, |
they became more aware of me as a black person, but
couldn't quite understand
my point of view. I was perceived as hostile. In the black world where I spent my weekends, I felt equally ill-treated. My Jamaican parents weren't willing or able to tutor me in their "old world" ways, yet they ridiculed and resented me for embracing the English culture into which I'd been forced by circumstances of their making. |
| Confused, and unable to be my "self," I became a chameleon in order to survive, while accepting that no one would know anything about me. I was a secret agent-- a very lonely thing for a child to be. | And then one day, when I was around eight years old, walking in the street in Whitton, one of my father's friends passed me in his car. As he cruised slowly by, he looked at me without saying a word or calling my name, and gave me The Nod. |
